


Thin Ice

by LavenderJam



Category: His Dark Materials (TV), His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
Genre: Being mean to kids, Birthday Cake, Gen, It bites her in the backside, Marisa flirts with the truth, Mother-Daughter Relationship, Wasting Food
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-11
Updated: 2020-10-11
Packaged: 2021-03-07 21:34:27
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,985
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26954434
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LavenderJam/pseuds/LavenderJam
Summary: “Well youruncleis wrong,” Mrs Coulter snapped. “Unsurprisingly,” she muttered under her breath, and Pan and Lyra shared a look. “Your birthday is today.”Lyra narrowed her eyes. “How d’you know?”Mrs Coulter paused then, her gaze fierce, though Pan could see her hands twisting in her lap. “I knew your mother,” she said, after a long pause, and the monkey turned to gape at her. “And she told me all about it. The day you were born.”(Set during Northern Lights, while Lyra is living with Mrs Coulter in London. On Lyra’s twelfth birthday, Marisa makes a fuss, and it backfires.)
Relationships: Lyra Belacqua & Marisa Coulter
Comments: 17
Kudos: 69





	Thin Ice

Breakfast quickly became Lyra’s favourite time of day in London. At Jordan, she’d learned to slurp down whatever the cook put in front of her, except on the days when Roger was able to steal away to her bedroom with tea and toast and extra sausages, the two of them giggling and eating together until Lyra was called for her lessons and Roger had to wipe down the long oak tables in the hall. In London, every morning was a feast for the senses. The breakfast table was littered with pastries and fruit platters and omelettes that Mrs Coulter insisted be made only with the egg whites, and Lyra’s mouth had watered at the first sight of such treasures and hardly stopped since.

At first, she’d been unable to restrain herself, cramming the delicate foods into her mouth with abandon, until a pointed look from Mrs Coulter had seen her shrink back and pick daintily at her New Danish pastry instead, while Pan stealthily herded sausages and hash browns into the napkin on her lap for later. Even with her newfound table manners, Lyra still bounded into the dining room each morning with gusto, her eyes scoring the table to see if the chef had prepared any new creations for her to sample. It didn’t take long for these extravagant luxuries to wend their way into Lyra’s expectations for the day.

She had also come to enjoy the mornings for their simple glamour, when Mrs Coulter would appear in her silk robe, her face covered in just the barest dusting of powder, her curls loose around her pretty face instead of perfectly coiffed. She would read the morning paper and open her letters with one quick swipe of her manicured finger, dropping snippets of the latest gossip at Lyra’s feet like a witch might drop breadcrumbs in a forest.

Lyra learned to sit quietly and observe her alluring new guardian in these early morning moments, knowing that once Mrs Coulter was adorned with her outfit for the day, her face painted on with a precision that could only have been gained from tracing the same pathways day after day, year after year, her voice would adopt its most dulcet tone, and the easy, rough remarks of the dawn would be replaced with meticulous barbs, crafted so effortlessly that it could only be something that required every ounce of energy she possessed. As Mrs Coulter dragged her around London to lunch with explorers and politicians and actors, Lyra knew that only she was privy to Mrs Coulter’s few unguarded moments of the day, a realisation that made her swell with pride. She began to look forward to their breakfasts with a passion that had previously only been reserved for her fortnightly sojourns on the roof with Roger.

On this morning, an unremarkable Thursday in December, Lyra’s mouth dropped open at the spread before her. The table was littered with the most astonishing array of sweets, the crowning glory of which was an elaborate three-tiered cake in the centre of the table, covered with immaculate buttercream and hundreds of delicate fondant flowers. There were bowls of truffles, of tiny meringues no bigger than her thumbnail, of sugar-encrusted sweets all colours of the rainbow. Mrs Coulter stood at the head of the table in her softest dressing gown, the baby blue silk matching the flowers on the cake to perfection. Lyra gasped.

“Wow!” she said, as Pan shifted into a butterfly and flew above the table to get a better look at the treats.

Mrs Coulter gave her a shy smile. “Do you like it?”

Lyra nodded, running up to the table and popping a fancy piece of chocolatl into her mouth. She cracked the hard shell with her teeth and caramel flooded her tongue. She made a noise of great appreciation, which seemed to please Mrs Coulter, who smiled and ran her fingers over the golden fur of her dæmon.

“’Course I like it,” Lyra said, pulling out her usual chair and picking up a doughnut with both hands. “These are more treats than I _ever_ saw at Jordan.”

Mrs Coulter beamed at her, a gentle blush suffusing her cheeks. “I’m so glad, Lyra.” She sat down on her own chair and poured herself a cup of tea. “The cake is chocolatl – I realised that I don’t know what your favourite is, but all children like chocolatl, don’t they? I had it made specially by the most darling bakery downtown. Each of those flowers was shaped by hand, you know.”

Lyra nodded, glancing at the elaborate cake again. “What’s all this for, anyway?” she said, jam smeared around her lips, sugar dusting her fingers.

Mrs Coulter looked stricken. “For your birthday, darling.”

Lyra laughed. “It’s not my birthday!” she said, reaching for another truffle.

“Don’t make yourself sick,” Pan warned as an ermine from her lap. Lyra scowled at him and selected another chocolatl in protest.

“I do believe it is,” Mrs Coulter said. “You’re twelve years old today.”

Lyra shook her head. “I en’t. My birthday’s on Saturday.”

The golden monkey leapt to the table then, and Lyra shivered. Mrs Coulter looked stern. “It is today, Lyra.”

Lyra frowned. “No, it’s on Saturday. The fourteenth. That’s what my uncle always said, and that’s when everyone would sing to me in hall.”

“Well your _uncle_ is wrong,” Mrs Coulter snapped. “Unsurprisingly,” she muttered under her breath, and Pan and Lyra shared a look. “Your birthday is today.”

Lyra narrowed her eyes. “How d’you know?”

Mrs Coulter paused then, her gaze fierce, though Pan could see her hands twisting in her lap. “I knew your mother,” she said, after a long pause, and the monkey turned to gape at her. “And she told me all about it. The day you were born.”

Lyra’s eyes widened. “ _What?_ Why didn’t you _say_ so?!”

If Mrs Coulter hadn’t been her favourite person before that point, she certainly was now. “Tell me everything about it. Everything.” Lyra grabbed a pastry and then pulled her chair closer to Mrs Coulter, so close that their knees brushed against each other under the table. The woman’s eyes softened.

“Don’t you want to open your gifts first?” she asked, gesturing to a pile of immaculately wrapped presents behind her, each striped box adorned with a white silk ribbon. Lyra’s eyes widened.

Pan leapt down from her lap to inspect the packages, sniffing each one as a little dalmatian. “This one smells good,” he said, gesturing to a small box. “And this one’s huge!”

It took an hour for Lyra to get through the pile of presents, because the opening of each gift involved numerous additional steps beyond tearing off the paper and squealing at the contents, as she’d quickly learned from Mrs Coulter’s admonishment after the first gift had been torn almost to pieces to release the red velvet dress inside and then quickly discarded in favour of the next box. Each item of clothing required a fashion show, and each tiny bottle of face cream and perfume required a demonstration from Mrs Coulter herself. By the time the pile was no more, Lyra was surrounded by more clothes and books and creams than she’d ever seen in her life, a sugar crash heading her way. She yawned as she surveyed her loot.

“Thank you,” she said, and Mrs Coulter smiled. “No one has ever done this for me before.”

Mrs Coulter tilted her head. “What do you mean?”

“Bought me presents and sorted a fancy breakfast and stuff.”

She saw the woman frown. “Your uncle must have, surely?”

Lyra shrugged. “He’d send me a card some years, with a few gold dollars in the envelope, which I used to buy a slingshot at the covered market and was great for fighting the gyptian kids.” Lyra thought for a second. “He visited one year, because he had a big meeting that was on the same day. He did sneak me away for an ice cream afterwards, though.”

He’d actually forgotten to take her out for a birthday treat, his presentation dragging on for half the night and rendering their plans cancelled. Lyra had sat on her bed with her coat on for hours, waiting for him, before Roger had burst in with a pilfered cupcake and bottle of cola, singing happy birthday at the top of his voice and making her forget that her uncle was nowhere to be seen in seconds. Lyra decided not to tell Mrs Coulter the real story. She liked her version, anyway.

The golden monkey let out a growl, but Mrs Coulter’s hand was on his head in a second, stroking him into submission. “Well, that’s a shame. No matter how low you set your expectations, some people always find a way to reach new depths of disappointment, don’t they?”

Lyra shrugged, not sure what she meant, her eyes drooping as the excitement of the morning hit her like a sedative. She got up from the ground, still dressed in one of her new outfits, and pressed a kiss to Mrs Coulter’s soft cheek. She smelled so sweet, as if her shower drenched her with honey each morning instead of water. Lyra lingered for a second, feeling an overwhelming urge to crawl into Mrs Coulter’s lap and fall asleep there. The woman reached out and ran a hand through Lyra’s hair.

“You look so grown up,” she said wistfully, taking in Lyra’s new dress and shoes.

Lyra nodded, stifling a yawn, and before she could stop herself, she’d slotted herself into Mrs Coulter’s unsuspecting arms, resting her head against the woman’s shoulders.

“Thank you,” she said again.

She felt Mrs Coulter’s hand stroke her back. “My pleasure, darling. Happy birthday.”

Something about the phrase set off a lightbulb in Lyra. “I almost forgot!” she said, pulling back and staring at Mrs Coulter, the woman wincing as Lyra exclaimed right beside her ear. “You said you’d tell me about the day I was born!”

Mrs Coulter faltered then, which Lyra could not abide. “Please, Mrs Coulter. You have to tell me. It’s my story!”

“It’s your mother’s story too,” she said, the monkey jumping to the arm of the chair and giving Pantalaimon a fright.

“Maybe, but my mother’s not here, and I am. It would be the best present ever.”

Mrs Coulter raised her eyebrow and looked at the extravagant gifts littered across the floor. “Even better than London’s finest shoes? That leather came from Italia, you know, and that blue dress was handstitched in New Denmark.” 

Lyra rolled her eyes. “Yeah, the clothes are nice. But I can hear this story _and_ have the clothes, right? Please, Mrs Coulter, please!”

“Don’t roll your eyes at me,” Mrs Coulter said, and Lyra bowed her head. She heard a sigh. “Alright. I’ll tell you.”

The golden monkey became very agitated then, pulling at Mrs Coulter’s collar with a whine. She shushed him sharply and then lead Lyra to the living room, where they sat on the sofa together, basking in the winter sun that was shining through the window. Lyra stifled a yawn as she clutched a throw pillow to her chest. She didn’t want Mrs Coulter to think she had anything other than her full attention.

Mrs Coulter sat down beside Lyra, her hands folded in her lap. “You were born in the afternoon,” she said after a moment, glancing briefly at the monkey before anchoring her eyes to Lyra. “Your mother went into labour in the early hours of the morning, but it wasn’t until almost midday that it felt like everything started happening at once.”

“Did it hurt?” Lyra asked, squeezing the cushion to her chest.

“Yes,” Mrs Coulter said immediately. “Yes, tremendously.”

“I bet I was a big baby,” Lyra said, nodding at Pan, but Mrs Coulter shook her head.

“No, you were a good size,” she said. “Big enough to have a strong pair of lungs but not so big that it caused any great problems. That’s what your mother said, anyway,” she added hurriedly.

Lyra was transfixed. “Where was this?”

Mrs Coulter paused. “You were born at home. In the bathtub.”

Lyra’s eyes widened. She looked at her dæmon. “See, Pan, I _told_ Tony Costa that I was the best swimmer out of everyone. I’ve been a swimmer from the minute I was born, that’s why.”

Mrs Coulter raised an eyebrow. “It could hardly be called _swimming_ , darling.”

“What would you call it, then?”

She thought for a moment. “Flailing. Babies are such helpless little creatures, you see. You couldn’t swim any more than you could haul yourself out of the bathtub to safety. If you’d been left to _swim_ you’d have drowned before you’d ever had the chance to take a breath.”

Lyra looked unimpressed. “Fine. So my mother pulled me out of the water?”

“Yes. A nurse was there, she cleaned you up, and – ” She faltered then, and swallowed. “And then you were in the world, and that’s that. Now, I have a lunch reservation in town – ”

“Was my father there?”

Mrs Coulter looked pained for a moment, but any discomfort was quickly replaced by her reliably serene smile. “No. He wasn’t. He couldn’t be.”

“Why not?”

“It was complicated, Lyra. He saw you soon enough.”

Lyra nodded, flopping back against the sofa, drunk on knowledge. “So, at the beginning, it was just me and my mother,” she said, letting the words spool through her mind. “That’s nice. I think I would’ve liked that.”

Mrs Coulter sat forward, her tails of her robe’s silk tie scrunched in her hands. She opened her mouth but no sound came out. Lyra smiled, waiting for her to speak, but then the monkey bristled and Mrs Coulter shook her head, as if emerging from a trance. “Anyway,” she said brightly. “That’s the story, and now you know.”

Mrs Coulter ran a hand through her unstyled hair. Lyra had never seen her stay unpolished this late into the morning. “Right, we are to lunch at the Arctic Institute – I’ve procured tickets to the new exhibition that doesn’t open until next week, you know, about the structure and manufacturing of sky iron – and I’ve also bought a box at tonight’s performance of the new pantomime at the National. We’d better get going, if we are to stay on schedule.”

“I have more questions about my mother, though,” she said, the hint of a whine creeping into her voice.

Mrs Coulter took her hands. “If you can be dressed, teeth brushed, hair combed and face washed in the next ten minutes, I’ll answer another question in the car, alright?”

Lyra sprinted to the bathroom, crashing into the door in her haste to fetch her toothbrush. Mrs Coulter winced as she heard the yelp. She stood and began to walk to her bedroom, avoiding her dæmon’s gaze as she did so. He opened his mouth as she swanned past, but she put up a hand to shush him. “Don’t,” she snapped, and he followed her to her bathroom without another sound, his tail dragging along the ground.

Extracting more details about her mother from Mrs Coulter over the coming weeks was like pulling teeth, and more than once was Lyra sent to her room over her inability to stop needling her guardian with questions. She learned to pick her moments, like when Mrs Coulter returned from a party, her lips stained with red wine, or on serene Sunday afternoons, when she was curled up with a book on the sofa and a mug of hot chocolatl and generally welcomed Lyra curling up beside her. The most effective strategy, though, was to bargain a question for a period of intense focus on her studies, wherein one aced quiz earned her the right to ask one question about her mother from Mrs Coulter, and she promised to answer honestly (Pan soon pointed out that they had no way of knowing whether or not Mrs Coulter was telling the truth about any of it, but Lyra had thrown him such a scowl that he’d never mentioned it again).

She learned that her mother had been an unusually intelligent woman and very beautiful, both answers that made Lyra glide around the apartment like a scholarly princess for several days, as if it was her birth right. Mrs Coulter had reminded her that if she wanted to be smart and beautiful like her mother, she’d do well to spend more hours at her desk and stop hiding her hairbrush whenever it was requested after one of Lyra’s baths. Lyra had frowned then and decided that maybe being smart and pretty wasn’t so important after all.

One morning near Christmas, when Lyra was running out of questions, she’d asked about her mother’s favourite food in exchange for reading four whole chapters of _Oliver Twist,_ the famous Christopher Dickens novel that Mrs Coulter had insisted all well-read young women should have perused.

After Lyra had plonked the book down on Mrs Coulter’s desk and given satisfactory answers to her questions about the novel’s early themes, Mrs Coulter nodded and said, “Very good, Lyra. That’s enough for today. You can entertain yourself for the rest of the afternoon.”

“You owe me an answer,” Lyra said, folding her arms. “My mother’s favourite food, remember?”

Mrs Coulter ran a hand through her dark curls. “So I do. Well…” She smirked then, as if she were about to spill a secret. “She liked to keep her preferences for everything, even food, close to her chest, because you never know when falsely sharing a favourite with someone might be an advantage, do you? But what she always craved, most of all, was a delicious steak, juicy and tender. The rarer the better, so that blood would drip down her chin if she wasn’t careful.”

Lyra’s eyes brightened. “You like rare steak too,” she said. “We have it at the weekends, when it’s just the two of us.”

Mrs Coulter froze. “That’s right,” she said. “But – ”

She didn’t get a chance to continue, however, because they were both distracted by the sound of a glass shattering across the room. The monkey must have knocked the tumbler onto the floor and was sitting guiltily by the mess. “Oh dear,” Mrs Coulter said, standing up. “Lyra, call for the maid, will you? And put some shoes on, I don’t want to be picking glass out of your feet later this evening.”

Lyra did as she was told, but when she returned to the study, patent shoes neatly buckled to her feet, she found the door locked. Mrs Coulter didn’t appear for several hours after that, at which point Lyra and Pan were engaged in a raucous game of hide and seek, their earlier conversation thoroughly forgotten.

A few nights later, with Christmas just around the corner, Lyra found herself tucked up at one end of the sofa with her book in her lap, a steaming mug of mulled wine on the coffee table. Mrs Coulter was at the other end, with her own mug and her own book, her dark hair shimmering in the glow of the candles that were flickering in the sconces. Across the room was a towering Christmas tree, which they’d decorated together the night before, Mrs Coulter holding Lyra steading on a stepladder so that she could place the star at the very top. A few presents had already appeared underneath, each of the tags reading _Lyra_ in perfect cursive.

Lyra looked over to her guardian and felt a warmth spread through her chest. She thought of the mornings spent giggling across the breakfast table, the endless gifts, the gentle way Mrs Coulter brushed the tangles from her hair after a bath. She’d even climbed into bed with her one night, after a terrible nightmare had rendered her tearful and unable to sleep.

“If my mother hadn’t died,” Lyra said suddenly, “do you think it might have been a bit like this?”

Mrs Coulter closed her book. “I think it would have been exactly like this,” she said, her voice hoarse. Lyra waited for the monkey to growl, but instead he looked to the ground.

Lyra nodded. “Shame their airship crashed.”

“Didn’t you like growing up at Jordan College?”

Lyra shrugged. “I thought I did,” she said. “But if I could have lived like this the whole time… I don’t know. I didn’t miss her until you told me all about her, but now… she sounds like she’d have been a good mother, don’t you think?”

“I don’t know, Lyra,” she said softly. “Maybe.”

“I think she’d have been good. I think she’d have been the best mother in the whole world. She’d have liked me too, right? I think so.” 

Mrs Coulter’s eyes were watering now, and she turned her head and blinked a few times. “I’m sure that she would have done. You’re a wonderful little girl.”

Lyra nodded, an ache settling in her chest. She hugged Pan tightly. “I’d give anything to meet her,” Lyra said. “I wish she hadn’t died. Otherwise I’d never have been without her, I can tell. She’d have been a good mother, I know it, she’d never have left me alone.”

Mrs Coulter drew back then, her face hardening like stone. Lyra shivered. “Life is complicated, Lyra,” she said sharply, reaching down to sink her hand into the monkey’s fur, which looked aflame in the candlelight. “Sometimes grownups have to do things you don’t understand.”

Lyra stared at her. “Good mothers don’t abandon their babies. Mine wouldn’t have. I just know it.”

“You know that, do you?” Mrs Coulter snapped, and Lyra clutched Pan to her chest. “And what makes you so sure that she’d have been so taken with you? A little girl who can’t sit still for more than five minutes, uneducated, scrappy, who’d rather spend her life running around on rooftops than learning _anything_ useful about the world. You think you’re so special, Lyra, do you? You’d have run her ragged, you know, refusing to pay attention, refusing to listen to her, learn from her – refusing to grow up!”

Lyra glared at Mrs Coulter. “Maybe she’d have liked those things about me. Maybe _she’d_ have liked running around on rooftops and having fun and making a mess, rather than sitting inside reading _books_ all day and being boring like you!”

The golden monkey leapt between the two them and screeched in Lyra’s face, his teeth bared, his eyes wild. Lyra hurtled backwards with a wail, Pan clasped in her hands.

“Your mother is dead, Lyra,” Mrs Coulter snarled, and Lyra felt her eyes fill with tears. “Her body burned to a crisp in that obliterated airship, and you’ll never know what she’d have thought of you, and whether she’d have found your incorrigibility and ungratefulness charming or frustrating, though I can hazard a guess.” Mrs Coulter stood then and walked towards her, the monkey prowling in front of her, hissing and howling. Lyra cowered, a few tears slipping down her cheeks. “Perhaps you should be glad that she’s dead. This way, she never had to see what a disappointment her daughter became.” Mrs Coulter glared at her. “Get out of my sight.”

Lyra ran away then, tears streaming down her cheeks as soon as she’d slammed her bedroom door. The next morning, Mrs Coulter was dressed by the time she sat down for breakfast, for which Lyra was only offered a bowl of plain porridge, with a single spoon of honey for palatability. After she’d forced down as much of the grey sludge as she could manage, she wandered morosely into the living room, and saw that the Christmas tree was gone, ornaments and lights and presents and all. Lyra stared at the empty space where such a happy memory had been made, and resolved never to think about her mother again.


End file.
